izigame.me

SNORE. Carrier Air Wing is kind of a glitch in the system for 1990 Capcom, being an obscenely boring game in a library of arcade titles that were anything but. Hell, a few months prior 1941: Counter Attack hit the arcades, and it was a vastly better game.
Carrier Air Wing is a horizontal shooter in which you're tasked with the destruction of an ultimate weapon. The story is of course meaningless (even though, amusingly, you're briefed on the missions by a Sean Connery ass looking dude), and the meat of the game is embarking on one of three planes with different attributes and blow up other planes, ships and the likes. The gameplay is adequate, it's functional, but is not satisfying or exciting in any way. It has probably a lot to do with the visuals. Everything looks boring in this game, your plane looks boring, the enemies look boring, the bosses look boring. Perhaps it's because of how static everything is. Everything has precious little frames of animations, with the game feeling like someone is moving paper cutouts of aircrafts and ships in front of you as a result. The realistic setting doesn't lend itself to the imagination of the artists, either. Even the bosses seem so mundane, they don't seem cool or impressive, they're just planes and sumbarines and assorted hardware store thingamabobs.
The gameplay can't really do the trick by itself. You have a fuel gauge a là 1943: The Battle of Midway that slowly depletes and acts as a health bar, but other than that it's standard fare. You can pick up three main weapons during levels, but one seems obviously better than the others, so there's not a lot of reasons to ever change it. They try to spice things up by having an end of level shop, Forgotten Worlds-style, and you can buy secondary weapons, shields or bigger fuel tanks. Items reset every mission though, so there is no sense of progression, and the secondary weapons rarely feel particularly fun (plus, they have limited ammo). Finally, everything is so expensive, so it's rare to be able to afford a lot of items at any given time. There is a game loop here, but the act of shooting is never very engaging, which is kinda sorta maybe possibly a problem in your SHOOTING GAME.
Though Carrier Air Wing is a playable game ("s' aight, it do the job", at its most fundamental level) and probably isn't insufficient objectively, it's aggressively mediocre and bland to the point of being offensive. A rare disappointment for the Capcom of the time, capable by then of producing excellent, quality arcade games.